A chair fit for a poet
FRONT ROW/Edited by Helen Meany Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill was appointed to the Ireland Chair of Poetry yesterday. She succeeds the inaugural professor, John Montague, who has held the position since 1988, when the chair was established by the arts councils North and South, in partnership with TCD, UCD and QUB. Ní Dhomhnaill will hold the position for three years, attached to each university in succession. She will deliver three formal presentations and hold informal workshops and readings. One of the best known of contemporary Irish-language poets, Ní Dhomhnaill (49) has an international reputation and her work has been widely translated in Europe. Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Medbh McGuckian, Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon and Paul Muldoon have translated her poetry into English, in bilingual editions. Her collections include Féar Suaithinseach, Feis, Pharaoh's Daughter, The Astrakhan Cloak and Cead Aighnis. She has also written plays for children, a screenplay, An Gobán Saor, and the script for a lyrical, semi-autobiographical RTÉ documentary, An t-Anam Mothála (The Feeling Soul), which encapsulated her artistic credo. It evoked her journeys between the Kerry Gaeltacht in the Dingle peninsula, where she spent part of her childhood, and the parched promontories of Capadocia, Turkey, where she lived for some years with her Turkish husband. Her script linked the rich folkloric heritage of the two places, which poetry had the power to recreate. "I think poetry springs from a level below meaning; it is a molecular thing, a pattern of sound and image." For her, the Irish language is the gateway to "an saol eile" or "an tír faoi thonn" - another world of the imagination and the psyche. Her answer to why she writes in Irish is given in what is perhaps her most famous poem, Ceist na Teangan: Cuirim mo dhóchas ar snámh I place my hope on the wate in this little boa of the language, the way a body might put an infan in a basket of intertwined iris leaves .. (From Pharaoh's Daughter, published by Gallery Press)
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